Archive: January 2012

Remembering

12 January 2012
Charles
23 Comments
Categories: bereavement, Memorialising

Posted by Vale

One evening last month we lit some candles, sat by the fire with an old book of photographs and reminisced about my wife’s mother who had died just over ten years before.

It was the first time we had done anything like this, but, over the last ten years, we have lost three of our four parents and are having to learn for ourselves how best to remember. The idea of the quiet time and the candles was our first attempt.

Then, a few days ago, with enormous pleasure and surprise, I came across this from the Gail Rubin in her book A Good Goodbye:

Every January 10, March 16, May 4, and November 2, I light a candle in memory of Grandma Dot, Grandma Min, Grandpa Ben, and Grandpa Phil. I put a picture on my kitchen table, and light a candle next to it the evening before. For that day, I imagine that particular grandparent sitting in with my husband and me as we go about our business and talk about our day.

It’s as if they get a glimpse into our current lives and I feel their presence for that day…

Remembering is about continuity and wholeness. It is restorative. In secular funeral services we tell people that the only afterlife we are certain of is in the stories we tell, the memories we share and the influence we feel in our lives. In the early days remembering is easy but In our fast forward world we have few traditions and no habits of personal and individual remembrance. Life rushes us along and too often the person you have lost feels as though they have been left behind.

Gail lists lots of ways that we could make space in our lives for remembering: cemetery visits of course, but how about memorial obituaries in the newspaper, placing photographs in the room at family get-togethers like Christmas, even household shrines.

We need something – a time or a place, an action, a personal ritual – to make remembering real again. Maybe it’s about tangible memorials and those glorious crafted containers. Maybe its something more private and personal. I know that in March and April I will be lighting candles for my own mother and father. What will you be doing?

By the way we’ve blogged about Gail’s book before. It’s worth reading not least because it led to a great discussion about shrines in the home. You can find our original review – and a link to Amazon if you’d like to buy a copy – here

Doc, how long have I got?

11 January 2012
Charles
No comments
Categories: Longevity

This will interest some of you at least — the more numerate and analytical. It’s an online diagnostic tool to determine longevity.

Here’s the rationale as described by the New York Times:

To help prevent overtesting and overtreatment of older patients — or undertreatment for those who remain robust at advanced ages — medical guidelines increasingly call for doctors to consider life expectancy as a factor in their decision-making. But clinicians, research has shown, are notoriously poor at predicting how many years their patients have left.

Now, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have identified 16 assessment scales with “moderate” to “very good” abilities to determine the likelihood of death within six months to five years in various older populations. Moreover, the authors have fashioned interactive tools of the most accurate and useful assessments.

“We think a more frank discussion of prognosis in the elderly is sorely needed,” said Dr. Sei Lee, a geriatrician at U.C.S.F. and a co-author of the review. “Without it, decisions are made that are more likely to hurt patients than help them.”

If that’s whetted your appetite, you can read the whole article here.

And you’ll want to have a look at the interactive longevity-calculating tool, ePrognosis, too. Tip: sign on as a healthcare professional to get the tool to work. Find it here. 

Utterly impersonal and awfully long

11 January 2012
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: ceremony, funeral music, Religious funerals

I follow The Hearth of Mopsus blog. I like it very much — the writer’s fastidious prose, his rigorous,  intellectual objectivity on the one hand, his very earnest doubts and self-questioning on the other. He’s written a very good book about holy wells, by the way. Not your bag? Fine by me. Each to his/her own. Much more to the point, I don’t comfortably think that he would like being talked about on this blog, and I’m sorry to do it to him but I’m going to do it anyway. 

In a recent post he describes his father’s funeral. He is a minister himself. 

The worst part was the minister. At least he wasn’t the ‘crem cowboy’ who’d taken my uncle’s funeral, but he was cracking on a bit then and may well not be around himself now. The chap who performed my Dad’s obsequies was a somewhat offhand Ulsterman who preached not on the Bible text that I’d chosen but on The Lord Is My Shepherd which was one of the hymns. The argument was: the Psalm that hymn was based on was written by King David. King David was a great sinner. He found peace and hope in his relationship with the Good Shepherd, and so must we. ‘We must do business with the Good Shepherd’, he said several times, having come up with a line he liked. 

He concludes:

I don’t know, perhaps I do it all wrong – perhaps I should be completely ignoring the deceased and whatever the bereaved might be feeling, and trying to convert people by making them feel bad rather than loved. You may detect a degree of scepticism in my tone. Thank God for Fats Domino or I would have been left thinking I’d prefer a secular funeral. Perhaps I still would.

You can read it all here. Do, please. 

You probably know how he felt. And we reflect that, though funerals need to be done better, because they matter more, than any other ‘life event’ ceremony, they’re not always, whether religious or secular. The occasion doesn’t look after itself, nor do the words, you can’t just arrange your face and rattle them off. That Ulsterman probably thought he did just fine. So, probably, do lots of secular celebrants. But this is a job for extra-ordinary people. 

You may need Fats to cheer you up, too.

Humanising the ancestors

10 January 2012
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: Art and death, ashes, memorialisation, Memorialising

We get quite a few emails here at the GFG from makers of ashes urns. Most of these urns are ghastly and get no more than a thanks but no thanks. We are unfailingly courteous.

This morning was an exception. We received some stunning images from a Plymouth-based ceramist, Alan Braidford — in answer, it almost seemed, to Richard Rawlinson’s post earlier on today. Wonderful work, we’re sure you’ll agree. There are virtually no makers of funeral urns whose work has evolved beyond the container-of-some-sort stage, but Alan’s urns are anthropoid — they are sculpted figures of humans. What a difference that makes. Depending on size, perfect for a garden memorial or for a family altar to the ancestors. Okay, so we don’t do altars to ancestors. Ours is a developed culture which has lost touch with the value of ritual observances based in an idea of duty. For the sake of our own emotional health, we need to reinvent these observances, and Alan’s work points the way. Do you think they speak too much of grief?

Here is Alan talking about what he does:

My ceramic work is figurative and mostly stoneware. The work is on a domestic scale ranging between 30 to 150 cm in height.

Although my natural impulse is to make sculpture, I am very interested in making functional pieces, and with this in mind I have been developing a series of simplified sitting figures to be used as funeral urns. As this work will be fired to 1250c it will be frost proof, and thus can be placed outside in a garden setting. Ashes or memorabilia can be placed inside the urn through an opening, before the ceramic is fixed to a stone base.

The look of my work is influenced by an interest in ancient history – Celtic, Etruscan, Cycladic and Middle Eastern.

Coiling is the construction process most employed, although I am currently developing a press moulded process in order to reproduce one of the urn designs.  Slips,engobes and lava glazes are used to add surface texture.

Alan is also interested in working collaboratively with bereaved people in the matter of design. If you want to contact Alan, write to him at alanbraidford(at)btinternet(dot)com. His website is here. 

Quote of the day

9 January 2012
Charles
No comments
Categories: funeral music, music, Quotes

“The music-loving world, temperamentally, seems to divide neatly into two. There are those who spend their idle hours thinking about which songs they would like to have played at their wedding; and those who spend their idle hours thinking about which songs they would like at their funeral …  Planning one’s funeral suits the auteur in me: as the sole honoree of that ceremony, I shall choose what music (and what readings) I jolly well like. I incline to the melancholy yet uplifting: music designed to induce a grave contemplation of my good taste, spiritual heroism and sensitivity. I’d like to pretend that I’m the sort of person who wants their funeral to be “a celebration of life”, but really I want people crying awfully hard.”

Sam Leith here. 

Battersea reborn

9 January 2012
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: crematoria

Since it went offline in 1983 a number of developers have strategised and sunk under the burden of putting Battersea Power Station to profitable use. It can’t be knocked down because it’s Grade 2 listed. Given its rapid rate of deterioration it’ll fall down of its own accord soon anyway.

A robust proposal for life after leccy was proposed by reader John Buckingham in a letter published in this week’s Spectator magazine:

“… The Victorians would have had no such scruples, had the opportunity been presented to them. With its four wonderful chimneys, it is splendidly set up as a central crematorium. The walls would provide ample storage space for urns, and the customers could be brought in by barge, obviating the wasteful need for travel to Golders Green and other distant parts.”

We like it. 

Soul medicine

9 January 2012
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: Uncategorised

We’ve not spent enough time on this blog talking about the value of psychoactive and psychedelic drugs in the treatment of the dying. Let’s start putting that right. We’re talking cannabis, here, and also LSD, MDMA (ecstacy, on the street), and  psilocybin, the fun ingredient in magic mushrooms. 

If you find yourself deeply sceptical and utterly disinclined, here are two tasters. 

Above is a talk by Marilyn Howell on how psychedelic therapy helped ease her daughter’s suffering at the end of her life.

Below is an extract from an article in the 420 Times about how a “60 something year old tea party type, a 2nd Amendment advocate, conservative, anti everything governmental, a war supporter” came around to feeding his dying wife cannabis-enhanced cookies.

If you want to delve deeper into academic research under way, go to the MAPS site. Highly recommended. Here. 

One day, this stuff may help you.  

I listened some months ago to Bob quietly lament his wife’s cancer to Ed in my office. While staring at the floor he sort of rambled unconnected ideas, randomly covering what he was thinking. “Can’t eat”, “always vomiting”, “losing weight”, “doctors know nothing”, “drugs don’t help”. He knew the end was coming and he just wanted her as comfortable as he could make her. It was one of those awkward moments where I saw in Bob a man who just needed to share his feelings and his fears. He wasn’t looking for an answer; he knew there aren’t any. It was one of those special moments when you know the man is letting you in for just a minute. Live long enough and you might be privileged to a few of these moments.

When Bob paused, Ed suggested she try marijuana. I instantly bristled. In a few words Ed espoused what benefits it might offer. Bob gave the look he always does when Ed says something he thinks is completely off the wall. I sort of
agreed with Ed’s reasoning and thought, “It couldn’t hurt”. Bob said she would never be able to smoke it. “Cookies, I’ll make her cookies,” Ed countered. “What kind does she like?”

“Toll House Chocolate Chip are her favorite” Bob said.

“I’ll make her a dozen tonight and bring them over. Where do you live?”

And so was born a 6 month long drug connection where dozens of marijuana laced cookies and brownies were purchased and delivered as part of an illicit NY drug trade between the most unlikely of partners. Every couple of weeks they would meet in the parking lot and I would watch the deal go down. It had none of the hurried nature of a typical street deal. To the uninformed all you would see is two older men greet with big grins and a hearty handshake. There was always some small talk before a few bills were held out and an oversized box of cookies under plastic wrap was handed over. Two men giving and taking and both being better for it. It was so natural.

Bob swore by them, “It’s all she will eat, I’ve had a few myself”, he said one afternoon with a cheshire grin. “It never completely eliminated the pain, it seemed to soften it”, he would later say. He did note her nausea all but stopped and she was able to maintain her weight till the end. His most telling comment was she stopped talking about her illness and impending demise. “The cookies relaxed her. She let it go and just let it come”, Bob said. “That was the biggest
blessing. It let us talk of other things; important things”.

Read the whole article here. 

WTF

8 January 2012
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: Co-operative Funeralcare

Sadly my father recently passed away and the thoughts of my family turned to appointing a funeral director. It was a toss-up between a local family-run firm and the Co-operative Funeralcare. In the end we chose the family firm, but it was a close-run thing.

When I registered my father’s death, the registrar said that the Co-op was growing in popularity and was very helpful and efficient. 

Source

The Good Funeral Guide
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